The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: a first step towards a sino-centric regional order?

Drs Matteo Dian and Silvia Menegazzi give a talk on the AIIB at the International Political Economy of East Asia Seminar

This presentation will analyse the strategy that led China to establish the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and its likely consequences for the regional and global economic order. The creation of the AIIB embodies a considerable shift for the Chinese approach to regional and global governance, constituted by an increasing will to promote a transition from a ‘Western-led governance’ to a more inclusive ‘East-West co -governance’.
Is the AIIB initiative just an instrument created to sustain China’s economic prosperity and Xi Jinping’s call for a ‘Chinese Dream’? Is it a consequence of China’s growing frustration with the Bretton Woods’ architecture? Or, is it rather a first stepping stone towards a new China-centered financial and economic order? Does this entail a relevant threat to the world’s economic order and its institutions? Or is it more simply a symptom of the increasing normative and institutional plurality of the current international order?
In this light, the seminar will scrutinize Beijing’s new multilateral project taking into account China’s growing regional role, and in particular, it’s renewed centrality in the East Asian region. In the course of the seminar, particular attention will be devoted to the analysis of the challenges and priorities as discussed by Chinese scholars, policy analysts and think tank experts.

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The Asian Studies Centre was founded in 1982 at St Antony's College and is primarily a co-ordinating organisation which exists to bring together specialists from a wide variety of different disciplines. Geographically, the Centre predominantly covers South, Southeast and East Asia. The Asian Studies Centre works closely with scholars in the Oriental Institute, the Oxford China Centre, the Contemporary Indian Studies Programme and the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies (in premises at...